VANCOUVER (CUP)—The arcade era was an incredible cultural movement.

Arcades were the birthplace of video games, an industry that now out performs both box office and music sales. In 2008 alone, video game sales generated over $21 billion in revenue.

But, while video games have now risen to prominence in the living room, arcades are, with a few exceptions, all but dead.

In order for one to under­stand how arcades died, it’s im­portant first to appreciate how they lived.

THE BEGINNING
You are 11 years old. You are walking through a shopping mall, trailing behind your moth­er as you adjust the straw in your Orange Julius to avoid being scolded for slurping. Your mom wants to return a pair of shoes to Zellers, but your eyes have wan­dered to the one store in the mall with a door.

You ask for some quarters, arguing that shoe shopping is “a total bummer.” Your mother searches her purse and produc­es a loonie, and you are already running toward the door.

The fluorescent lights of the mall vanish as it shuts behind you. Glowing neon, Guns N’ Roses posters, pictures of girls on motorcycles.
You walk along the stained casino carpet to a change ma­chine. You enter your dollar and four quarters jangle as they fall. You make your way past a man who kicks a machine and screams “That’s bullshit!” as his frog is crushed by an on­coming semi.

You reach your destination. The marquee of the cabinet reads “Donkey Kong.” You insert your first quarter and are no lon­ger in a shopping mall. You are in a construction site, trying to save your girlfriend from a giant monkey.

IT’S LIKE TABLE TENNIS, WITHOUT THE TABLE
The early 70s—a time when a young Michael Jackson and his four less talented siblings ruled the Billboard charts with some song about the alphabet, and President Richard Nixon found himself facing impeachment charges for his tape collection— marked the period that the first Pong cabinets began to spring up all over North America.

For many people, this two dimensional interpretation of ping-pong was their very first experience with electronically interactive entertainment—the former name for video games.

You could move your paddle up or down. That was it. But, after the initial novelty of “Look Ma, I make the pictures on the TV move!” wore off, there wasn’t much rea­son to continue playing.

Also, the vast majority of Pong machines were inside bars and liquor stores, so the player de­mographic was severely limited. Electronic gaming couldn’t be part of mainstream culture until everyone had access to it.

Atari, the game’s developer, realized this and sought to rem­edy the situation by releasing Home Pong, a variant on the arcade hardware that hooked up to the TV. Home Pong fore­shadowed the forthcoming dominance of household game systems, commonly called con­soles, as it sold over 150,000 copies in the holiday season of 1975.

While Pong did sow the seeds for what would eventually be­come the arcade scene, the home version set into motion the console gaming behemoth that would one day eclipse it.

Eventually, Pong found itself off in a corner, collecting dust, reminiscing about the good times with the pinball machines that preceded it.

SOME SORT OF INVADERS, POSSIBLY FROM OUTER SPACE
Early game developers bore wit­ness to the meteoric but short-lived rise of Pong and were eager to try and retain the audience that it left behind.

Enter Space Invaders. Re­leased in 1978, Space Invaders had players driving a tank and defending earth from alien spacecrafts.
In terms of player interaction, the game really wasn’t much more sophisticated than Pong. You still moved a knob from left to right, except now you had a single button that was used to fire.

But unlike its predecessor, Space Invaders enjoyed longev­ity with its players and went on to become an international hit. While it may not sound like much, keep in mind that Space Invaders’ heyday came at a time where the entire world was in a state of Star Wars-induced hysteria.

Yet, the single biggest con­tributor to the popularity of Space Invaders was that it al­lowed players to record high scores under their initials. High scores had been a huge catalyst for the growth in popularity of pinball, a factor which video games expanded by letting players leave their initials as a legacy. These ab­breviated names added a com­ponent of one-upmanship and competition that dramatically increased arcade revenues.

By the start of the 80s, games like Asteroids, Defender, Missile Command, and Centipede had become so popular that hav­ing them in bars was actually hurting liquor sales—patrons would rather wait in line to take their stab at the Frogger high score instead of drinking White Russians.

It was around this time that the first dedicated video arcades began opening across the conti­nent. Space Invaders proved so addictive that medical doctors were warning patients that con­tinuous play could permanently damage one’s manual dexterity and even lead to early onset of arthritis.

THE WORST VIDEO GAME OF ALL TIME
Video arcades, unlike bars and liquor stores, provided children and teenagers with the opportu­nity to get their hands on video games, a move that would for­ever change the industry.

Gaming was now reaching the demographic of its dreams. By 1981, the arcade gaming scene was estimated to be generating well over $25 million dollars a year.

But while arcades were flour­ishing, the home console market provided direct competition with the likes of the Atari 2600 and the ColecoVision consoles. They offered inferior versions of ar­cade hits, but they kept quarters in kids’ pockets.

While the Cold War dominated most of the headlines at the time, the war between arcades and consoles was becoming a bloodbath.
The greatest blow to the Atari home console came with the re­lease of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. After lengthy negotia­tions with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures, Atari secured exclusive rights for a video game based off the box-office smash for $20 million dollars.

Unfortunately, these nego­tiations had gone on so long that Atari only had five weeks to com­plete the game in time for the holiday season. Comparatively, Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark had taken seven months.

It comes as no surprise then that the resulting product was absolutely unplayable. Think Star Wars prequels bad; Matrix sequels bad. That is, unless travelling six entire screens in search of Reese’s Pieces sounds like a good time to you.

Even though Atari was fully aware of the problems with their game, they still went ahead and manufactured an astonishing four million copies, though only 1.5 million ever sold.

As a result of overproduction, hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges were buried in a New Mexico landfill.

The critical reception to E.T left most gamers disenfran­chised with the poor quality of most Atari 2600 games, leading to the home console crash of 1983.

It appeared as though arcades had won out.

WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA
The release of Pac-Man was pivotal to the gaming scene; it remains to this day the most widely distributed arcade game of all time.
But, its influence on the indus­try was more significant than its off-the-charts popularity, or the terrible Buckner & Garcia pop single, “Pac-Man Fever.” What set Pac-Man apart was that Pac-Man was a character.

When you played Pac-Man, you weren’t controlling a spaceship, or a tank, or a missile launcher. Pac-Man was like a yellow, round, and appendage-less per­son. Oddly enough, Pac-Man’s faceless, moving semi-circle was the most marketable image in gaming—and in the video game industry, there is nothing more important to publishers than franchises.

Like many other mascots, Pac-Man went on to transcend his original medium. He ap­peared on lunch boxes. He had a Saturday morning cartoon. He even had his own brand of ce­real. Kids had the Pac-Man board game on their Christmas lists, next to Duran Duran’s self-titled debut album.

In response, game developers eagerly rode the coat tails of Pac-Man with more and more char­acter driven games, replacing their inanimate military vehicles and racecars with characters like Q*Bert and Jumpman from Don­key Kong.

JUMPMAN THE CONQUEROR
The golden age of the arcade—1979–1985—came to a screech­ing halt in 1985, when the Nin­tendo Entertainment System was released in North America.

Arcades had managed to shrug off the threat of home gaming consoles before, an easy feat with Atari 2600s and its massive library of bad games. But Nintendo had something their failed predecessors lacked: Jumpman, who at this point had just been renamed Mario. Mario would eventually go on to become the most beloved icon in all of gaming.

When Super Mario Bros. launched alongside the NES, it changed everything. Suddenly, the one-to-three minute standard spurts of classic arcade gaming weren’t good enough, not when Super Mario Bros. could take hours to complete.

In Super Mario Bros, gamers found a design principle that arcades just couldn’t offer: dis­covery. Mario was free to explore a world that offered alternative routes, pipes that lead to hid­den rooms of coins, and secret warp zones that only your cool­est older cousin knew about. The once sought after high-score was ignored in favour of beating the final boss.

One of the unavoidable truths of arcade games is that they were designed to kill the player quickly, as that meant more quarters for vendors. As a result, arcade games needed to remain simplistic in order to keep plays short and revenues high.

This inherently prevented arcades from having any chance at competing with the more involved superstars like Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda, and Metroid.

APPROACHING FATALITY
As gamers’ tastes grew sophisti­cated, interest in arcade games dwindled and most large-format gaming centres closed down. Cabinets started disappearing from donut shops and grocery stores.

By the start of the 90s, the Sega Genesis and Super Nin­tendo consoles had risen to such prominence that arcades were largely forgotten and its games were relegated to light entertain­ment for children at Chuck E. Cheese.

Just as it seemed that arcades had gone the way of the disco ball, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of Street Fighter II—a fighting game in which players selected a racial stereotype of their choice and tried to beat up the opposing player. Sound revo­lutionary? It was.

Street Fighter offered a prem­ise simple enough to lure play­ers to the cabinet (“Fight!”), but that also offered more depth than nearly anything on a con­sole. Street Fighter fostered a competitive environment like no other, as the game winner got to continue playing for free. Play­ers were no longer competing against a score; they were com­peting against the person right next to them.

Consoles couldn’t offer this opportunity to face ever-changing competition and for a while, it seemed as though arcades had found a niche they could defend. Mortal Kombat followed in kind, and though it was the fighting game equiva­lent of Milli Vanilli—all style and no substance—its gratu­itous violence attracted throngs of teens back to arcades.

Arcades had found their mojo again. While both games were ported to home consoles, they, and their sequels, remained im­mensely popular throughout the early 90s.

GAME OVER?
As technology improved through the mid-point of the decade, it became clear that 3D graphics were going to be the next big leap, and this time arcade game developers didn’t want to be caught with their pants down.

The philosophy at the time was that if arcades could offer experi­ences that one couldn’t get on a console, then surely gamers would come. Light gun shooters such as House of the Dead, immersive racecar simulators like Daytona USA, and games with cutting edge graphics like the Virtua Fighter se­ries became the status quo.

While these attractions proved supremely popular, they also came at a cost. The high devel­opment and hardware costs of these games meant vendors had to charge gamers more. Where quarters once sufficed, dollars were now required.

As console graphics im­proved, arcades needed to buy new machines, further raising costs. Arcade owners scram­bled to keep up with each other, spending beyond their means. Yet, gamers were turned off by the now sky-high prices, espe­cially compared with console games.

The one advantage arcades held over console and computer games—human interaction—was lost to the Internet. Now, in 2009, the nearly ten million World of Warcraft players stomp a death march around the ar­chaic dollar boxes.

Arcades are now all but obso­lete, and only the most densely populated urbanized areas are able to support them.

You are back in the arcade. A particularly cunning barrel has fallen from a ladder and killed you on impact. You notice your mother waiting near the door and know that your time has passed.

As you leave the mall your mother asks you a question that gives you pause: “Why do you waste all your money on those machines? You have all those games at home.”

But she simply doesn’t get it. She’s right, of course, but she’s as oblivious to the truth as she is to the fact that she’s totally embarrassing to shop with, and that shoes are also, in fact, totally lame.

After some thought you reply: “Yeah, I do. It’s just not the same. Can we go to the Dairy Queen?”